Boring, complex and important: a recipe for the web's dire future

Mod your sounds with RjDj

This article was taken from the January issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online

You’ve heard of augmented reality &ndash; this is augmented music. RjDj (Reality Jockey DJ) is a free iPhone app that detects ambient sounds, rips out samples or mutates them into harmonies, then intelligently mashes them up with what’s playing. It has been downloaded more than 300,000 times and now its 37-year-old creator, Michael Breidenbruecker, has bigger ideas.

ADVERTISEMENT

The Austrian-born technologist dreamt up the concept back in 1999. “I observed that for some people drugs affected how they heard music,” he says. “I wanted to create that without chemicals. With CDs or MP3s we listen to music in a frozen form, but virtuosity is lost in recording: that’s why live concerts are so successful. I wanted a new format that could react to context.” He shelved the idea in 2002 to set up Last.fm, and there it stayed until 2007 when he realised that the iPhone was its natural platform.

Today, Reality Jockey has produced “scenes” (reactive tracks) for bands from Little Boots to Kids on DSP, and more than a million have been downloaded. One of the format’s boons, Breidenbruecker says, is discouraging piracy: “It’s music that is more like software, so you can offer add-ons and upgrades &ndash; that’s a practical reason to register it. Why would you register a normal Metallica album?”

ADVERTISEMENT

But as a small start-up there’s pressure to innovate. Wired was invited to a strategy meeting in their Farringdon offices where Breidenbruecker revealed his plans for the “RJC 1000” software that he hopes will bring RjDj into clubland. An “RJ” will use it to send sound-chewing filters out to punters’ iPhones as they listen to a live band through their devices’ mics. “So, for example, the saxophone might play one note and you’ll hear it split up into many,” he explains. The project trials in New York later this month.